by Paul Butler
The unemployment rate for young black men in the hood can be as high as 50 percent.55 Teens from all backgrounds tend to be conspicuous consumers, but many African American teens do not have legitimate ways to buy stuff. Their parents can’t afford it, and they can’t get a job to buy it themselves, so some of them use illegal means to get what they want.
Science has also given us new insight into the factors that contribute to violence in high-poverty communities. Lead paint poisoning, for example, reduces people’s ability to control their impulses—one of the primary risk factors for violence. One of the tragedies of the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan, is that years from now, it may cause elevated levels of crimes such as assault and homicide. And, when that happens, many people will bemoan “black-on-black” crime and not acknowledge the direct role of the government in creating the madness.
I don’t experience personally the stresses of people who live in the high-poverty areas where African Americans are most at risk for violence. But if I lived in the hood, I probably would not have much respect for the law. I might carry a gun if it made me feel safer.
As a teenager, I did my share of stupid things. Scientists have discovered something almost any parent of a young person could have told them: human brains are not fully developed until we are around twenty-five years old. The dumb things I did as a teen would have much more severe consequences today, both because the system has become more punitive and because I would be watched in a way that was not true thirty years ago.
Mix all these factors together—the survival skills for staying safe in the hood, the vast deprivations of high-poverty neighborhoods, the disproportionate and intense surveillance of black men—and add easy access to guns, and you get a toxic stew.
Traditional methods of crime control are also less effective in communities where too many people are locked up. Offenders are not deterred by the threat of incarceration because incarceration seems inevitable. Their norms of ethical behavior are influenced by standards outside the law, because the law seems so hostile to them.56 This creates a vicious cycle because incarceration itself is criminogenic after a certain tipping point, meaning that interactions with the criminal justice system—including brief, pretrial stays in jail—have been shown to increase the likelihood that a person will subsequently be convicted of a criminal act. Furthermore, few people in prison receive the services they need to equip them to successfully come home. This is one reason why more than half of prisoners who are released from prison will return within eighteen months.
WHY DON’T MORE BLACK MEN COMMIT CRIME?
Sometimes African Americans discuss among ourselves what would happen to white people if they had to experience what black people experience on a daily basis. Blacks often tell ourselves that white people would react in more antisocial ways than we do. In the context of violent crime, there is intriguing data from social science. It turns out that when white men are exposed to the same level of structural impediments as black men, white men are more likely to commit homicide than black men.57 The “racial invariance” theory asks whether certain factors better predict outcomes for one race than another. For example, does unemployment affect African Americans differently than Latinos? Several sociologists have done sophisticated regression analysis to try to answer those questions. Graham Ousey, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky, was interested in racial invariance for predictors for homicide. He found that conditions like poverty, unemployment, and family structure are stronger predictors for white men than black men.58 Another study found that being unemployed was a stronger predictor of violent crime for white men than black men.59 These studies suggest that black masculinity is not a cause of disproportionate violence by black men but rather, in some instances, a protector against it. So for all of the criticism that African American masculinity receives, it turns out that there is something redemptive about it. It prevents black men from responding violently when similarly situated white men would.
In the end, the problem with focusing too much on black male behavior is that it does not lead to a productive solution that stops the violence. It puts too much blame on black men. It makes it sound like they should just stop killing each other and everything will be fine. And most importantly it absolves the dominant culture—white society, and especially elite white people—of any responsibility. The late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia famously said, “There are no debtor or creditor races.” But Justice Scalia was wrong.
WHITE CULTURE AND BLACK MALE VIOLENCE
What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.
—National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1965
In the United States there is no poor like black “po.” In the old joke, it’s so po it can’t even afford the extra letters to make “poor.”
There are many poor white people in the United States. As a group, they have a significantly lower risk of being incarcerated for a violent crime than African Americans. The same is true of Latinos. Sometimes people use those facts to suggest that you can’t blame poverty for why blacks disproportionately commit some crimes. But low-income African Americans have categorically different life experiences than low-income Americans of other races, with the exception of American Indians.
THE UGLY FACTS: PART 2
Median household wealth:
White: $111,145
Hispanic: $8,348
African American: $7,11360
Those numbers actually don’t tell the whole story. More than 60 percent of African American kids are raised by a single black woman. The average net worth of a single black woman is one hundred dollars. Twenty-five percent of black families have less than five dollars in savings.61
Percent of children who live in high-poverty neighborhoods:
Asian American: 8 percent
Latino: 24 percent
American Indian: 31 percent
African American: 32 percent
White: 5 percent62
Nobody should think that poor white people have it good. But their experiences are more comparable to middle-income African Americans than to poor black people. Indeed in some ways poor white people have better outcomes than wealthier African Americans. A family headed by a white high school dropout has more wealth than a family headed by a black college graduate.63 Middle-class black children are more likely to go to prison than poor white children.64 Blacks who make more than $100,000 per year live in more disadvantaged neighborhoods than whites who make $30,000 per year.65
Why does poverty make things so much worse for black people than whites? Why, in some ways, does race seem to limit middleclass blacks more than class limits poor white people? One reason is that low-income African Americans tend to live in much more economically segregated spaces than low-income whites. They don’t have the same proximity to middle-class people, and the goods and services that attach to them, including better schools. This entrenched poverty greatly constrains educational attainment, upward mobility, and even health. Professors Robert Sampson and William Julius Wilson wrote, “Racial differences in poverty and family disruption are so strong that the ‘worst’ urban contexts in which whites reside are considerably better than the average context of black communities.”66
The law has played an instrumental role in creating the concentrated poverty that allows violence to flourish. In his important article “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates described how racist housing policies steered African Americans to certain communities and locked them out of opportunities to build wealth.67 The Federal Housing Administration declined to insure mortgages in neighborhoods where black people lived. Practices like redlining “spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.”68 As a result, black families were �
�herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport,” leading to further exploitation and ultimately to declining property values in black communities.69 This “concentration of disadvantage,” Coates points out, was a consequence of federal government policy rather than just the actions of private individuals.70
We have seen that the structural conditions of high-poverty neighborhoods are strongly correlated with people being at risk for violence. In the United States, seven out of eight people who reside in those communities are people of color. To state the obvious, people don’t live in the most deprived neighborhoods because they choose to. They live there because white supremacy severely constrains their choices. One study found that racial inequality raises the rate of black-on-white homicide. Black-on-black homicide, at the same time, increases the more deprived and segregated a neighborhood is.71
White supremacy is “the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races, especially the black race, and should therefore dominate society.”72 Although the phrase calls to mind the night riders of the Ku Klux Klan, it is more helpful to think of white supremacy as law scholar Frances Lee Ansley defines it: “A political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and nonwhite subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”73
White supremacy means that white people are complicit in, and derive benefits from, the conditions that hold African Americans back. In a system of racial inequality, as black people lose, white people win. This is not the same as saying that all white people are racist. Individual white people may or may not be; the fact that every white person benefits from white supremacy is simply another description of the role that race plays in their lives. Where white people live, who they marry, how they worship, how much money they make, and which politicians they vote for are based on choices they get to make, and opportunities they get to have, because they are white. Thinking of these as cultural practices helps us understand the role of white culture in creating the black criminal.
Indeed the recognition that race-based structural deprivation was the most important explanation of black criminality used to be commonplace. Thinking about crime in black communities, President Truman in 1947 and President Johnson in 1965 both blamed racism. But as the United States has become, since the 1970s, the most punitive nation in the world, the way we think about causes of crime fails to take racism into account. Our harsh sentencing laws are premised on personal responsibility and free choice. But a young black man in South Central Los Angeles does not have the same kinds of choices as a young white man in either Beverly Hills or Appalachia.
The bad news, and the good news, is that none of these vast differences in opportunity is an accident. All are the result of government policies. It’s bad news because the fact that the government created the hood demonstrates its antipathy to its black citizens. It’s good news because government policies can also do substantial work in making things better now.
We know this because African Americans are not the only group in U.S. history that have had some of their members turn to crime because they were shut out of other ways to achieve the American dream. Immigrant communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often involved in criminal activity. According to historian Daniel Bell in his classic 1953 essay “Crime as an American Way of Life,” Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, and Italian Americans represented “a distinct ethnic sequence in ways of obtaining illicit wealth.” Yet as they were afforded a wider array of economic choices, each of these groups assimilated and crime went down. As legal scholar David Wade writes, “As each group acquired the wealth and social position accompanying the profits of illicit activity, they invested in legitimate businesses and assumed a greater political role in the dominant, legitimate society.”74
Ira Katznelson points out in his book When Affirmative Action Was White that white ethnic groups were also aided in their economic rise by “Social Security, key labor legislation, the GI Bill, and other landmark laws that helped create a modern white middle class.”75
By contrast, African Americans were locked out of these social programs. For example, farmworkers and maids––who made up “more than 60 percent of the black labor force in the 1930s”––were “excluded from the legislation that created modern unions, from laws that set minimum wages and regulated the hours of work, and from Social Security until the 1950s.”76
Compounding this lack of a social safety net for many African Americans, the government subsequently implemented harsh criminal justice policies that led to mass incarceration, turned a blind eye to housing discrimination, and failed to invest seriously in education and effective job training in low-income communities. Given the lack of economic opportunity, it is not surprising that many young men in these communities turned to criminal activity and participated in illegal markets with higher rates of violence.
There are two things we need to do to dramatically reduce black male violence, though it is not clear that we have the political will to do either. First we need to get rid of the hood—segregated, high-poverty communities that are breeding grounds for homicide. This requires financial assistance to help families move places where they would have better outcomes, and a shift in white culture such that middle-class white Americans are comfortable with having poor black families as neighbors. Policies to promote this kind of economic and racial integration include the national “Moving to Opportunity” project, in which poor people were given housing vouchers they could use only to move to middle-class communities.77 Children who moved at a young age had significantly better outcomes than kids who remained in the high-poverty neighborhoods.78
One study found that if black men graduated from college and received the same incomes as white men, the homicide disparity would be reduced by more than 50 percent.79 People in high-poverty neighborhoods could be offered free college educations and subsidized jobs to make this happen. Taxpayers seem okay with handing out the $25,000 per year to house and feed these men in prisons and jails across the country. And most citizens seem quite content with the significantly larger sums the government hands out to middle-class and wealthy Americans, including $400 billion every year in subsidies to citizens to promote home ownership, retirement savings, and economic investment. In fact, half of government handouts go to the wealthiest 5 percent of taxpaying households. The bottom 60 percent receive only 4 percent of those benefits.80 But a transfer of wealth that would reduce black male violence by offering black men education and jobs would be seen as an unacceptable government “handout.”
Near the end of his administration, President Obama endorsed the concept of some form of race-based government investment in the African American community. In an interview with the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, Obama said, “Theoretically, you can make obviously a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks but in the form of a Marshall Plan.” A large-scale intervention to eliminate high-poverty segregated neighborhoods would save the lives and enhance the safety of countless African American men.
Second, we need to greatly limit access to guns. In an article entitled “How the Gun Control Debate Ignores Black Lives,” ProPublica reporter Lois Beckett describes how the debate about gun control frequently leaves out black men. Beckett writes, “Gun control advocates and politicians frequently cite the statistic that more than 30 Americans are murdered with guns every day. What’s rarely mentioned is that roughly 15 of the 30 are black men.”81 Conservative politicians like Donald Trump who harp on
“black-on-black” crime are often the most protective of gun rights. Limiting access to guns on a national basis, in the way that most other Western nations do, would also save the lives of thousands of black men each year.
But again, there seems to be no political will for this crucial intervention to reduce black male victimization. After the tragic incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when a gunman killed twenty-six people, including twenty children, some activists sensed an opening. They were concerned, however, that the reforms that were being discussed, like banning the kind of assault rifle the Sandy Hook shooter used, would not have much of an impact on gun violence in the hood, where people are killed with guns that are easier to obtain than the Bushmaster XM15-E2S that the Sandy Hook shooter used. According to ProPublica, a group of activists met with Vice President Joe Biden’s task force on gun violence to lobby for interventions that would have more of an impact on the urban communities that were most at risk for gun violence. The activists were turned down. As ProPublica reports:
“What was said to us by the White House was, there’s really no support nationally to address the issue of urban violence,” said the Rev. Charles Harrison, a pastor from Indianapolis. “The support was to address the issue of gun violence that affected suburban areas—schools where white kids were killed.”